Backup systems and methods may run periodically, but may leave gaps in data protection. For example, a system outage resulting in a data loss may result in a permanent loss of the new or changed data on the system since the last backup. Depending on the frequency of backups and the importance of the data, the consequences of the data loss may be significant. For example, even if the data is backed up every hour, a single hour may contain significant financial transactions or other important data.
Continuous data protection (CDP) systems may attempt to protect data by capturing changes to data to a separate storage location. CDP systems may rely on processes running on machines receiving continuous data protection (CDP) (CDP clients). In the event of an outage or disruption affecting a CDP client, there may be no method to ensure that CDP processes are not adversely affected. For example, if a CDP client crashes and is restarted, there may not be an effective or efficient way to ensure that the CDP process running on the client is restarted. If data is added or modified after the restarting of the CDP client machine and the CDP process is not restarted on the CDP client machine, the added and/or modified data may be lost in a subsequent outage or disruption.
Other events may also affect CDP services such as the failover of a CDP client machine in a computing cluster, such as a high availability computing cluster. For example, a primary node in a computing cluster running a CDP process may fail and a failover may occur to a secondary node in the computing cluster. The secondary node may begin handling data traffic and a CDP process may not be running on the secondary node. As a result, added and/or modified data may be lost in a subsequent outage or disruption. Additionally, disruptions or outages may include other events, such as network disruptions, application errors, CDP process errors, and/or power outages.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there may be significant problems and shortcomings associated with current continuous data protection technologies.